There’s a lot of talk of cream at Pizzeria Verita. The mozzarella, made in-house every day, is creamy — so creamy it’s served the day it is made for antipasti, but a day or two later on the pizza. It’s too heavy, creamy, to place on pies the day the mozzarella is made.

The creme fraiche — adapted from a secret Internet recipe, says co-owner John Rao — also gets a lot of buzz. It’s a main ingredient on a seasonal pizza that is outlasting the season: creme fraiche with sweet corn and speck, a cured ham.

But kitchen manager Jason Van Dine talks about cream, or Cream, of a different form.

“This place is really about the three owners,” Van Dine said. “I compare them to Cream, the first super-group. Those guys were each masters of their own instrument.”

At the restaurant, the member of the management trio is a master of his or her domain, explained Van Dine, a guitar player and former employee at Stone Soup.

“John is the pizza guy; David is the front of the house,” Van Dine, 37, said. “Leslie is personnel. She’s the liaison. She’s kind of like Ginger Baker on drums, keeps the two communicating together.”

John is John Rao, 63, a onetime Perry Restaurant Group bigwig who left the restaurant business when his daughter, now in college, was born.

The restaurant business is all-consuming if you do it right, and no good when you’re trying to raise a family, Rao said. He went into real estate for about 20 years. “I got sucked back in,” he said.

David is David Abdoo, 60, who owned the Chicken Bone. He’s the general manager at Verita and said he will likely exercise his option to become a part-owner. “We get our energy from the people,” Abdoo said on a busy Friday night, amiably working the crowd.

“Pizza is a fun food,” Abdoo said. “People are smiling when they’re eating.”

Leslie is Leslie McCrorey Wells, 51, former co-owner of Purple Knight Pizza, later called PK Cafe. She and her business partner closed their Colchester restaurant in May, 2010, about the time Rao — a long-ago Perry Group colleague — contacted her about joining the Neapolitan pizza venture.

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“I said lose my number,” Wells recalled. “People were coming in (PK) and crying, and these guy are like, ‘Come on, let’s meet.’”

They’re a persuasive duo. After Wells had settled the closing of her business and had a little time to breathe, “that pang came back,” she said. “I love the idea of putting a project together.”

Wells sensed a connection, and thought they’d have fun together. “We’ve kind of created our own community,” she said.

The Cream restaurant team is described in show-biz terms by Abdoo, too. “You know those movies where the old guys get together and do something?” he said. “That’s us.”

Or, in Rao’s words: “We’re freaking dinosaurs and we opened a restaurant.”

He practiced for the moment for a couple of years: making pizza for friends in the wood-fired pizza oven he built in his Burlington backyard, experimenting with tomato sauces.

Pizzeria Verita makes Neapolitan pizzas – the dough is, at once, chewy (doughy!) and crisp. The pizzas are baked for 90 seconds in a 900-degree wood-fired oven, a kiln-like tiled beauty that was shipped from Italy. Its placement in the restaurant was decreed by a visiting expert from Pontinia, Italy, via New York City, Roberto Caporuscio of Keste Pizzeria in Greenwich Village.

The story goes that Caporuscio walked in the door of the St. Paul Street eatery and pointed to a spot in the back of the dining room, pretty much dead-center, and said: “Put the oven there.” No one questioned why or how Caporuscio — considered a guru in the world of Neapolitan pizza — chose that site.

It was worth the airfare for this architectural/culinary pronouncement, Rao and Abdoo agree.

Caporuscio, 52, said by telephone Wednesday that he chose the spot because it is “close to the kitchen and for the visual of the customers.” He felt the site would optimize the use of the space. Caporuscio moved to the United States 13 years ago. His hometown, Pontinia, is between Rome and Naples, about an hour from each city.

“I talk with Leslie and she’s really good for pizza-maker,” Caporuscio said. He was working at his midtown restaurant, Don Antonio, training Neapolitan pizza makers, Wednesday. His Bleecker Street pizzeria was without power due storm Sandy.

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Under Caporuscio’s guidance, the restaurant came upon its sauce recipe: San Marzano tomatoes, ground, and sea salt. The tomato sauce is uncooked when it is put on the pizza dough.

“Everybody in Naples makes it that way,” Caporuscio said. “If you have a good tomato, you don’t need to cook it.” His favorite pizza is a simple one: water buffalo mozzarella, tomatoes and basil.

Before opening Pizzeria Verita, Wells trained with Caporuscio at his New York pizzeria.

“It changes your whole concept of how to put food together,” she said. “The whole idea is to bring these simple ingredients together and they cook in the oven. It’s so fresh and delicious: You taste every single flavor.”

I was the beneficiary of a baby bowl of tomato sauce and a cappuccino topped with steamed buttermilk. These improbably paired tastings were a pleasurable accompaniment to the tale of how Verita came to be. The story unfolded, as promised, like the script of a later-in-life De Niro flick.

“We’ve come a long way,” said Patrick Densham, lighting the oven (still warm from the night before) at 1:30 on a Friday afternoon. Densham, a pizzaiolo who helped renovate the restaurant, was igniting a pile of wood coals that would grow and glow through the evening.

A kitchen-helper was roasting strips of eggplant, and Van Dine was squeezing out balls of mozzarella, creamy and salty. Rao, bouncing around the place, explained that he had started the day at 9 a.m. with a round of Bikram yoga, before picking up clams for the night’s pizza special.

I returned for this event, having seen on Verita’s Facebook page a photo of clam pizza. It reminded me of pizza I occasionally ate when I was a kid in New Haven, Conn. We usually got onion pizza, but every so often splurged on clam pizza at Pepe’s, a famous pizza place in Wooster Square.

The reminiscence-by-photo was almost too good to be true: Sure enough, the Verita menu last Friday night noted the clam pie was “inspired by Frank Pepe.”

My 40-year-old memory was not let down: The pizza, baked with whole-belly clams and Romano cheese, was crispy on its perimeter but chewy and even briny at its clammy center, with plump baked fish as a kind of a treasure. (Customers sitting at the bar next to us told management the pizza was short on clams; for their comment, they got free drinks.)

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Maybe because my daughter threw a fat clam or two my way, I had no complaints. The cheese and garlic melded with the seafood, and I was transported to a booth at Pepe’s and big pizza pies on thin paper. My daughter, a no-frills pizza type, was skeptical in advance: But I couldn’t wrest a bite from her and she ate her crusts, after 14 years of piling them on my plate.

I’ve eaten and enjoyed the mais/creme faiche pizza, and more standard varieties at Verita: sausage and mushroom, tomato and mozzeralla. The salads also are excellent. I strayed from the very good mista — a heaping mound of local greens, with red wine vinaigrette — to try the Caesar and was rewarded. This salad, also a generous portion, is crisp romaine, hearts and leaves, in creamy, sharp dressing served with white anchovies and a wedge of focaccia.

The front end of the meal was so good, I almost forgot about the cannolis with chocolate chips (made by Maria Ferrentino of Charlotte), and house dessert: finger-licking, tongue-scorching, Nutella-filled baked dough.

Rao loves talking about the food at his restaurant. “Are you excited?” he asked, before dangling a piece of eggplant in front of me. And he likes to take his turn every so often working the line. “Otherwise, all I’m doing is schmoozing,” he said. (He’s pretty much perfected that, but needs to keep up his practice of stretching and shaping — not tossing! — the pizza dough.)

The plates at Verita aren’t quite big enough to hold a quarter of the pizza, which is how the pies are sliced. You can eat (messily) off the plate the pizza is served on or the small rectangular one meant for eating. Or you can dispense with plates, pick up the slice, fold and eat.

This was the method of choice for one diner, recently, at a table for three: An Italian, a Croatian, and a vegan dining together. The three are temporary regulars and problem solvers in a world more complex than how to eat pizza efficiently. They’ve come to town from afar to consult on robotics and electronics.

The Italian, in particular, knows about pizza and ambiance — as well as robots. He seems, also, to have mastered the plate problem: eating in European style with knife and fork.

“It’s really a good pizza from Napoli,” said Pierfrancesco Tateo, 48. “It’s a very good taste and filling.” He praised the choices available for toppings, including the melanzana — Italian for eggplant. He also ate tomato pie with arugula, vegan-friendly.

“The guys are really lovely,” Tateo said of the owners. “It’s a place where people enjoy to stay — a good resonance, a good vibration of this place.”